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Once again I couldn’t sleep, and this time I’d come out to the living room to listen to a new Rosary CD that my blog readers told me about.

The calming effect of this CD rivaled any drug in the world. A priest began each mystery with a short reflection on the life of Christ. Each word was said slowly, carrying a gravitas that could only come with decades of prayer and hard-earned experience. Then he and a golden-voiced woman alternated saying each Hail Mary and Our Father. Violins and a classical guitar filled the background. The tune was both hopeful and mournful, brimming with the tension that comes from knowing that love is always entwined with sorrow. It was like the theme that would be played at the resolution of a great epic.

I escaped into the gentle tones of his words. I first thought that this must be what the voice of God himself would sound like, but the more I listened the more I understood that that this was the voice of a fellow traveler, a frail human who had known what sorrow life has to offer, whose love of God sustained him.

I positioned the headphones on my ears and leaned back onto the couch. Directly across the dark room, that picture of my grandparents’ young family remained facedown on the mantle, like a shrine to an unjust God. I closed my eyes every time I caught sight of it.

“The Third Sorrowful Mystery,” the priest announced, not a trace of tension in his words. “The Crowning with Thorns.”

He described this moment in which soldiers pressed a wreath of needle-sharp thorns onto the head of the man who had dared to give them hope that he really was a king and savior. In the tradition of the Rosary, the priest then considered the moment from the point of view of Jesus’s mom, who surely was aware of the event. The mention of mothers and sons made my eyes dart to the picture on the mantle, but I quickly looked away.

The priest wondered what it must have been for Mary to hear that her son’s torturers had not only killed him, but mocked him by placing a fake crown on his head that was specifically designed to cause him pain. “The head that she had held, of the tiny baby. The head of her little boy, that she had caressed.” I choked at the words little boy, unable to banish the image of the giggling toddler in the black-and-white photo, with a face just like my son’s. “The head of her beloved son, whom she had seen healing and preaching, is now filled with wounds.” Without pausing for a breath, he began the Our Father. The words of the prayer descended on me like a tidal wave. The dirge of the solemn violins broke something in my heart, and raw sorrow poured out. I wrapped my arms across my stomach and leaned forward until my head touched my knees, like someone seeking shelter in a storm that threatened to destroy everything. All the misery of the human experience, all the agony that I usually shut out of my mind, all the heart-wrenching things that I tried to pretend didn’t happen while I was living my comfortable suburban existence, it all came crashing in, and this time I did nothing to stop the process. I just listened to the Our Father and let sorrow inch up within me, even though it felt like I might drown.

Each time I thought of a new tragedy, a new cosmic injustice that I’d read about in history books or heard on the news, the image that would come to mind was that of the two graves, my great-grandmother’s and Tommy’s, their dates of death one day apart. Their slate-gray tombstones were billboards announcing that very bad things do happen to good people sometimes, and God does nothing to stop it. I didn’t think I could bear it when I considered what my grandmother must have felt when she stood in front of those two stones and saw the dates of death for her mother and her firstborn child: April 22, 1945, and April 23, 1945.

I had been lost in that moment for an endless string of minutes, when the tide of thoughts ebbed, and a new idea came to mind. It had to do with April 1945. There was something about that date. I had heard of something else happening then—not a distant historical event. Something to which I had a connection. April. 1945. What was it?

A jolt went through me, and I threw off the headphones and raced to our bedroom. I tripped over a pair of shoes, clicked on the lamp on my bedside table, and shoved a stack of books onto the floor. There it was. The envelope that my mother had given me, with the letter about my grandfather’s service during World War II.

Joe turned over and was mumbling incoherent questions at me, but I clicked out the lamp and ran back to the living room. The glare of the overhead lights would have blinded me, so I switched on the single light above the fireplace, half-covered by a casing so that its glow shone down only onto the mantle. I dropped down on the edge of the couch and unfolded the paper.

Lt. Geraghty received the high award of the Bronze Star Medal because one bitter night. . .

No, it was after that.

For my money, Lt. Geraghty is all man.

No, before that.

Men were wounded and dying . . . Some were bleeding and helpless in midstream.

Close. I was close now.

And then I found it. The date that my grandfather miraculously survived his suicide rescue mission: April 30, 1945. Eight days after the accident.

For half an hour I read and re-read the letter, stopping at the date every time. I knew from family history that it had taken some time for the military authorities to find my grandfather to tell him about the accident, and that he’d returned as soon as he got the news. So on the night of the rescue, he had no idea. Of course he didn’t. Had he known that his wife was at home in an empty house, the bodies of their child and his mother-in-law resting in a graveyard, he would have never put his own life at risk.

My hand set the letter on the coffee table as if acting on its own, since I was too stunned to will it. My grandfather had been spared. And, now that I thought about it, the family had always considered it a minor miracle that my grandmother herself survived the accident despite being violently thrown from the car. She was five months pregnant, and her baby defied the odds and lived, also. That baby was my mother.

I stood up and walked circles around the coffee table, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, barely aware of my own movements as I retreated into the supernova of thoughts and emotions that filled my head. A primal part of my consciousness, residing some place still like the bottom of the ocean, a place safe from overanalysis, told me that God had saved my grandfather; in those most secluded recesses of my soul, I believed that it was divine intervention that had protected him as he crossed a river in Germany under a downpour of bullets, and that that same divine hand had spared his wife and unborn daughter, too.

I thrilled to consider it. But immediately, it brought me back to the Lazarus problem: Even if God did raise the man from the dead, it begged the question of what he was doing during the other billions of deaths that occurred after Lazarus’. If he could save my grandfather from getting shot in Europe, why couldn’t he save a two-year-old little boy in New Jersey?

My usual reaction to a thought like this would be to begin a multi-step process that started with shouting accusatory prayers to the heavens and concluded with questioning God’s existence. But this time, within me there was one grain of gratitude, one miniscule part of my soul that felt like I owed something to the God who had protected my mother and grandparents. The least I could do would be to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I had been working from the premise that a loving God could not allow suffering, and so every time I encountered it, it sent me into a tail-spin of questioning everything I thought I knew about God. Standing in the middle of the room, I closed my eyes, let myself be in silence for a moment, and then I changed my premise. Out of a sheer sense of duty, I whispered to God, I will start by assuming you are good. I will begin with the belief that you do love us, all of us.

The tinny voice of the priest floated up from the headphones on the couch, the s sounds of blessed and grace the only noise in the room. I moved back to the couch, returned the headphones to my ears, and—acting on sheer instinct—slid down on my knees in front of the coffee table. I straightened my back and neck in a signal of attentiveness, I said a prayer for understanding, and I listened for the voice of a good God.

By the time the Sorrowful Mysteries were over, my posture had slouched. When they reached the Glorious Mysteries I was dozing off, his words fading out intermittently, as if someone kept pressing the mute button on the CD player. I was in an almost trance-like state, somewhere between life and the unconscious world.

The words of the ancient prayers became tangled with thought-threads of tombstones and gunfire, little boys photographed in mid-giggle, blackened burnt-out cars, and a man named Lazarus stepping out of a tomb.

This mystery calls us to think of our own eternal destiny, someone said, from a place far away. The sufferings of this life are not to be compared to the glory that is to come.

My eyes eased open at the word “suffering”. The voice jumped back into the headphones, and my thoughts came together enough to realize that this was the final Glorious Mystery, a meditation on the fact that God gave Mary a place in heaven as the queen of the new creation, as mentioned in the book of Revelation.

“When you say the Rosary, no matter whether you are in joy or sorrow, dreadful fear or in exultation, always turn to this mystery,” the old priest said. “Because someday, you and I hope that we will be crowned with grace and glory, in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.”

Our Father, who art in heaven. . .

Heaven. . .

Heaven. It had been a subject I’d studiously avoided from the first moment I’d considered that Jesus might exist. Even within Christian theology, very little was known about the place. Not many details had been revealed, and our limited perspective within the material world wouldn’t allow us to understand it well anyway. And so, for fear of making up stuff that sounded good but wasn’t necessarily true, I had spent very little time pondering the afterlife.

I leaned up. That was a problem. Maybe even a big problem.

I’d read all sorts of theological insights about how there was no suffering, no death, in God’s original plan. I understood that the first humans chose it for themselves when they severed their connection with the divine good because they wanted to be gods; I’d seen for myself that the rest of us continue willfully to turn away from God every day. I’d pondered the stunning idea that, rather than letting us languish in the cesspool we’d created, God jumped in with us, suffered with us—and for us—to show us the way home. It all sounded great. Until I pictured my grandmother holding her dying child on her lap in an ambulance, and then the rich theological insights disintegrated into impotent words.

But what I had not been factoring in was heaven.

Starting with that childhood moment at The Creek, I’d always been acutely aware of the fleetingness of human life. Now that I took that same awareness and examined it in light of the existence of heaven, everything changed. I’d always heard the ticking of the clock that counts down the seconds as we all get closer to death; now I should see its ticking as a countdown to the end of unjust suffering. As an atheist I mourned the fact that nothing good would last; now it was time to accept the fact that good did last, and it would last forever. Only suffering would end.

I rose from the couch and approached the mantle. I slid the picture off the shelf and held it in my hands, searching the eyes of my grandmother, my grandfather, and, finally, their son. Their suffering was terrible, and God thought so, too. He hated what was going on down here on earth so much that he allowed himself to be murdered, simply to open up an escape hatch for us to get out. And now, my grandparents and their son had gone through it. They were out of this land of war and fire, bullets and car accidents. They were in a place where everything they had suffered on earth was rewarded with limitless joy.

I thought of Lazarus again, that moment when he was called back from eternity, waking in the tomb to see the rays of light shoot through the darkness. Scripture never did say what happened after that. The author John simply recounted that Jesus raised him from the dead, and then he moved on to the next subject. I had always supplied my own image to round out the story, with Lazarus rushing out and giving Jesus a bear hug, almost knocking him down in his excitement and gratitude.

But as I looked at Tommy, and thought once again of where he was now, the scene of Lazarus was utterly transformed. I rewound back through the images of the celebration and the hugs, back to that moment when he first saw the cracks of light. And for the first time, it occurred to me that maybe Lazarus was disappointed.